Running the Asylum

Do Americans realize how radical Trump’s operation has become?

By Nick Catoggio, The Dispatch, Sep 12, 2024- Nostalgia is a thief and a liar. It steals the pleasure we should take in progress and replaces it with nonsense about the past. If you find yourself pining for days gone by, chances are you’re not pining for an era that was “better.” You’re pining for the simplicity of youth. 

I hate nostalgia, especially as a reactionary political gimmick, but we’re all prone to it. This week, I found myself feeling nostalgic for the relative sobriety and judiciousness of … Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.

I realize that I’m fooling myself, as nostalgists usually are. After all, from his first moments as a presidential candidate in 2015, Trump was demagoguing illegal immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He landed on America’s political radar in 2011 by tantalizing suckers with lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He’s always been a cretin and a smear merchant with a taste for intimidating critics. If he had displayed a shred of sobriety or judiciousness as a candidate in 2016, he wouldn’t have become a darling of feral populists to begin with.

But if you were the sort of partisan conservative who was keen to find reasons to support him that year, you could find them. He chose the very sober Mike Pence as his running mate. He ended up with Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus as a top adviser, both of them old political hands. After he won and began to fill out his Cabinet, he selected sensible figures like business executive Rex Tillerson and retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for top positions. ... Trump would never be sober or judicious himself, but it was conceivable that the political operation supporting him would be.

Not anymore.

This week, in the span of about 96 hours, a lie about Haitian immigrants killing and eating people’s pets made it from the dregs of online populism to J.D. Vance’s social media account to Trump’s own lips ...Trump visited New York and Pennsylvania on Wednesday to commemorate the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he brought with him a 9/11 truther who ... Any 2016-vintage pretense that the inmates aren’t running this asylum is gone. The man in charge can’t restrain his worst impulses, ... assuming he ever could, and the people around him seem eager to encourage rather than restrain them.

“Trump has decided to pal around with someone whom MTG thinks is too racist,” ... “MTG,” of course, is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the kookiest, least decorous populist figures in a party that’s chock full of ‘em. Even Greene was offended, though, when MAGA “influencer” Laura Loomer sneered that a White House inhabited by Harris will “smell like curry” and would probably employ a call center with an unintelligible customer satisfaction survey tacked on at the end. .... Perhaps, egged on by his yes-men, he can also no longer resist including some of the sleaziest, most sycophantic demagogues in his movement in his personal entourage.

... A figure like Tucker Carlson doesn’t need J.D. to convince Trump to take his calls, but the advice he gives Trump might prove more influential now that Vance is there to amplify it behind closed doors. 

... Trumpist righties have had lots of practice at creating their own reality. They’re good enough at it to have given their man a 50-50 shot at the presidency after four criminal indictments, two impeachments, and one insurrection. I would not bet against them on this.

Now, the other question: What’s left in this deplorable party for traditional conservatives?

... His operation thrives on threats and propaganda, fantasizes about persecuting its political enemies, hatches malign schemes to install coup-enablers in influential positions, and on most issues, apart from immigration, barely makes a pretense of having a policy agenda. Its popularity can’t even be excused as a reckless backlash to mass privation, as happens sometimes in countries following an economic calamity. There’s nothing civically healthy or politically redeeming about any of this. What on earth are people doing supporting it? (read it all)

Top Stories